William O Mullane
Moved up the satellite chain from control systems in the European Space Operations Centre to the science end of the missions in ESTEC and discovered Gaia. Started with C++ and moved on to Java and Enterprise level systems. Did some serious ground breaking numerical programming in Java.
Managed a reasonable sized team and collaborated with the 300+ scientists and programmers on the Gaia Data Processing project. Next became responsible for all the science ground segments in ESAC Spain as manager of managers.
Now responsible for all the data comming from Rubin Observatory and getting it to the community.
Sessions
Rubin is now about one year in operations and DM has delivered several Data Previews including DP2 which contains the extensive and good commissioning data. We will show some results (yes pretty pictures ) of our superb pipelines, discuss some of the challenges of moving and processing TBs of data from Chile and to serving Ks of users. We will perhaps mention a few lessons learned. Rubin has also transitioned from a stand alone project to being embedded in an organisation - we shall ponder organisational inertia and team vs organisational clashes.
Astronomy is entering an era in which several major facilities are simultaneously operating, or standing up, science platforms designed to deliver petabyte-scale data and computing to their communities. As missions and observatories move from data collection to data delivery at scale, they are independently converging on similar architectural choices — and independently running into similar operational challenges — around federated access, compute-to-data, authentication, and long-term sustainability. This BoF is proposed by confirmed panelists from Euclid/ESA Datalabs, Vera Rubin Observatory, the SKA Regional Centre Network (SRCNet), Roman Telescope, CADC/CANFAR, NASA/Fornax and LOFAR. Other platforms are invited to join the discussion to compare architectures, operational lessons, and user-facing services for large-scale science platforms and workflows.
With Euclid's Data Release 1 (DR1), a full year of Vera Rubin Observatory operations, the launch of the Roman Space Telescope, and SKA Low's science verification getting underway next year, the timing is ideal to take stock of what's working, what isn't, and where the community could converge — on topics such as federated data access, compute-to-data models, interoperability standards, and the balance between bespoke platform development and shared infrastructure. Panellists will open the session with a short position statement on how their platform is architected and operated today, before the floor opens to a moderated discussion aimed at surfacing common challenges and concrete opportunities for collaboration across observatories.